God in Gotham: Tim Keller’s theology of the city

Introduction

For American evangelicals ¹ in the 1970s and 1980s, religious life was vibrant, lively, and prominent. Evangelical churches all over the United States were growing at a historic pace, as mainline Protestant churches were shrinking. Billy Graham was fighting the evils of atheistic communism in his coliseum-packing crusades; Newsweek named 1976 “The Year of the Evangelical”; President Jimmy Carter was leading the free world as a born-again Christian; and Ronald Reagan was elected president thanks to the political machinery of the “Moral Majority.” Figures like Francis Schaeffer and Larry Norman were bringing Jesus to pop culture, while Carl F. H. Henry and Millard Erickson were defending the philosophical underpinnings of evangelical epistemology. Greg Thornbury, the recently inducted president of King’s College in Manhattan, called this era the “dawn of ‘classic evangelicalism’” (2013:1).

What is often lost in such a take on evangelicalism’s cultural dominance during this period is a confession of the damaging “underbelly” to the story. The growth in evangelical prominence corresponded with the post-World War II flight of white Americans from the cooperative location of city life. In droves, evangelicals left the city for the comfort and predictability of suburbia. Suburban churches grew along with this migration, but urban communities suffered in the newly created vacuums. What remained of city life, now increasingly ghetto-ized, was the “inner city,” a euphemism for neighborhoods marked by poverty, racial imbalance, and minimal access to economic and social resources. As white evangelicals continued to flee, they created “edge cities” (Garrau, 1991; Conn, 1994: 134–46, 190–91), where civic life was not defined by geographic proximity but “commute time”—to and from work, home, shopping, and social activities—all by car. White evangelical churches followed their people and their people’s living patterns, eventually developing into “mega-churches,” mirroring the time-oriented and consumeristic identity of their constituencies, and making the geographic proximity of church communities and their city neighborhoods a thing of the past (Wells, 1993; Lints, 2013).

An awareness of these trends gradually rose to the surface, as a handful of sociological, anthropological, and theological works, including many written by evangelicals themselves, emerged in the 1990s and 2000s (Mulder and Smith, 2009; Emerson and Smith, 2001; Massey and Denton, 1993; Massey and Gross, 1991). Evangelical theologies of the new millennium have recognized a sense of complicity in the social and racial problems associated with suburbanization and have subsequently directed missional resources to urban development. Now, evangelicals are migrating back to the “center.” It has been estimated, for example, that in “Manhattan Center City,” the area between 125th Street and 96th Street surrounding Central Park in New York, there was a new evangelical church founded nearly every week between 2008 and 2010 (Karnes, 2010; Luo, 2005). Indeed, “the number of congregates in Manhattan Center City has tripled in ten years” (Karnes, 2010). ²

Alongside the increased numbers in city and church populations, various theologies of the city emerged to direct the missiological strategies of evangelical churches. One such theology may be found in the writings of Dr. Tim Keller, pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in the heart of Manhattan. As Keller assessed the needs of his community, he found that the church-growth strategies of “edge cities” were not working, so he adjusted his ministry focus to the center of urban life, integrating his ecclesial community into the civic community of New York City. Within just a few years of its founding in 1989, Keller’s church grew into a vital congregation with over 5,000 members. By 1998, Redeemer had initiated a church-planting ministry, “Redeemer City-to-City,” which has since planted over 200 in 35 cities worldwide.

In this article, I will consider the theology guiding the Redeemer Presbyterian Church movement and analyze Keller’s recently published Center Church: Doing Balanced, Gospel-Centered Ministry in Your City (2012), in which he outlines the theology and strategy of his missiological model: can Keller’s theology serve as a worthwhile corrective to the sociological and racial problems associated with evangelical participation in white flight? Ultimately, we will find Keller’s theology to have an individualized and apolitical emphasis that makes it inadequate to the social challenges facing the city today, particularly those caused by white flight and the new return of white evangelicals to city life. The problems surrounding suburban migration were social in nature, so the theologies constructed to correct those problems must be social as well. I will address this inadequacy in three parts: first, I will summarize the theology of the city that Keller lays out in Center Church; second, I will highlight the non-social emphases of his city theology; and third, I will look to other sources to suggest that evangelical theologies of the city must be willing to integrate social analysis into the methodological infrastructure of their missiologies.

Tim Keller’s theology of the city

The country is where there are more plants than people; the city is where there are more people than plants. And since God loves people much more than plants, he loves the city more than the country. (Keller, 2012:170, quoting Bill Krispin)

Keller summarizes his understanding of the city by highlighting its two diverging qualities: “Because the city is humanity intensified—a magnifying glass that brings out the very best and very worst of human nature—it has a dual nature” (Keller, 2012: 135). Like humanity, cities include both good and evil, violence and peace, injustice and refuge. For this reason, Christian engagement with the city should be both affirming and critical. Beginning with accounts of the city in Genesis, Keller traces this dual nature of the city throughout the Bible. The first mention of the city (‘îr in Hebrew) is in Genesis 4, where Cain, the fratricidal son of Adam and Eve, builds a city and names it after himself. Although this early association obviously contains pejorative connotations, we find rather immediately that the city is a place of cultural development, with music made from “stringed instruments” and “all kinds of tools” cast of bronze and iron (Gen 4:21–22). This both-and understanding continues in the remainder of Genesis. One observes suspicion in the narratives of Babel, Sodom and Gomorrah, and Abraham’s call away from Ur, but after the Israelites settle in Canaan, the assessment of the city changes. “Cities of refuge” are established to protect society’s outcasts (Num 35:11–12), and the city of Jerusalem becomes “the dwelling place for God’s name” (Keller, 2012: 140; cf. 1 Kgs 14:21). This favorable understanding is further developed in Isaiah, where the words “Jerusalem,” “mount,” “mountain,” “Zion,” and “city” are all “interchangeable terms showing the city’s centrality in the divine plan” (Keller, 2012: 141).

But the primary episode Keller uses to construct his theology of the city is the Babylonian exile. It is here that he finds the most useful placeholder for a Christian understanding of the city today. While exiled in Babylon, the ancient Israelites were told to remain in Babylon—increasing in number, indeed flourishing in and on behalf of their home away from home (Jer 29:6). Thus, on the one hand, Babylon is “the epitome of a civilization built on selfishness, pride, and violence” (Keller, 2012: 142). Yet on the other hand, the Yahweh-fearing citizens of Babylon were “called to be the very best residents of this particular city of man” (Keller, 2012: 142–43, italics his). Serving this city was a central part of God’s plan and eventually guaranteed the Israelites’ freedom (Jer 29:7). Indeed, Keller notes, it was because of the Israelites’ faithfulness to this command that they accrued enough civic leverage to return to their homeland. “God ties, as it were, the fortunes of the people of God to the effectiveness of their urban ministry” (Keller, 2012: 143). This both-and understanding of the city in which God’s people dwell is likewise reflected in the New Testament, where the church, like the exiled Israelites, exists “as a countercultural fellowship” (Keller, 2012: 146), a “dispersion of people from every nation under heaven, just as Israel did in the exile” (Keller, 2012: 148, citing Acts 1; 1 Pet 1:1; Jas 1:1). The people of God maintained a primary allegiance to their “home country” and were formed by its values, but they lived as resident aliens in a country where they were expected to live as full participants in civic and cultural life.

City and gospel mission

You can’t reach the city [with the gospel message] from the suburbs, but you can reach the suburbs from the city. (Keller, 2012: 159)

As Keller’s narrative moves into the New Testament, he highlights the city’s central role in mission. It is in a city where God’s redemptive plan will ultimately reach culmination. The “new Jerusalem” provides a kind of bookend with the Edenic vision of fruitfulness in Genesis 1. God’s final work of redemption occurs in a city complete with walls, gates, and streets (Rev 21–22). Further, Keller observes that the creation mandate of Gen 1:28 is ultimately fulfilled as a cultural mandate. Christians respond to God’s blessing of fruitfulness by cultivating a gospel-oriented culture, a cultural garden where all vocations—artists, scientists, doctors, teachers, and so forth—are carried out to hasten the realization of the eschatological vision. Every calling is “empowered by the gospel and is a result of the gospel” (Keller, 2012: 36). The gospel “re-tunes us to God” and provides a backdrop for the claim “that all Christians are people in mission in every area of their lives” (Keller, 2012: 272).

In this regard, the city is a place where churches can start a “movement” (Keller, 2012: 249–380), a culture-wide phenomenon initiated and empowered by the gospel. The most fruitful churches are “organized organisms” that capitalize on their urban location and mirror the dynamism marking the best of human endeavors. Movement churches are missional, strategically mobilizing the members of their congregation to impact their community and, by extension, the world. Center churches maximize this potential by emphasizing organizational activities like purpose and vision over rules and procedure, by making decisions relationally and rapidly, by valuing risk and serendipity, and by emphasizing the present and the future over the past (Keller, 2012: 344–54). If the church intends to transform international cultures and professional communities, it looks for ways to plant itself strategically in all aspects of city life. Christians are active in education, economics, and art, “crucial” areas, where tradition and innovation meet. Missional churches

will reproduce into other churches that reproduce themselves for the same reasons . . . The more ideas, leaders, and resources that are pooled and deployed, the more movement dynamics strengthen and snowball. As long as the reproducing churches keep a unified vision, the movement can build steam and grow steadily, even exponentially. (Keller, 2012: 337)

Sitting rather prominently in the background here is a handful of 20th-century evangelicals (Stott, 1990:58, Greenway, 1978:15, Allen, 1962:3) who found a precursor for this strategic understanding of the city in the book of Acts. According to their reading, the church grows through its integration into various metropolitan centers, including Jerusalem, Ephesus, Philippi, Tyre, Sydon, and ultimately Rome. More recently, the Dictionary of Biblical Imagery put it this way:

There is a sense in which the city is vindicated in the history of the early church—not in the sense that the city is mainly good or cordial to the gospel but in the sense that the city is where most people live and where the influential power structures exist . . . It is easy to see that the mission strategy of the early church was to evangelize the city. It is no exaggeration to say that in Acts the church is almost exclusively associated with the city. (Ryken, Wilhoit, and Longman, 1998)

In this particular reading of Acts, which is important for Keller’s own missiology, the early church was essentially an urban movement, only secondarily moving into the rural areas of the Roman world. It was by way of the city that the world could be reached. Today, our global society is watching international cities grow in number and prominence. As they do, Keller insists, it is vital that Christians follow the example of the earliest church. Christians must “catch up” with the growth of cities to ensure that the gospel spreads effectively. The city is the key to reaching the world. It is strategic ground zero for mission activity.

Unpacking the (non)social implications of Keller’s theology

We may move into our assessment of Keller’s theology by returning to the initial concern of our article: does Keller’s missiological emphasis on the city provide an adequate response to the problems of suburbanization and its theological counterparts? Put another way, as evangelicals join the move toward re-urbanization, will their theology contain a methodological infrastructure adequate to the new challenges facing urban communities, including but not limited to the problems associated with gentrification: rising housing costs, a minimized voice in local politics, and new forms of displacement?

We must respond first by insisting that the phenomenon we now refer to as “white flight” was the culmination of a complex set of factors, including cultural patterns, economics, language, the teachings of the religious communities of city-dwellers, and notions such as self, race, and freedom that these teachings informed. As early as the 1960s, sociologists were demonstrating the economic and racial causes of white flight (Glazer and McEntire, 1960), and such studies continue today (Kruse, 2007). In a 1996 study, Chicago and Harvard University professor William Julius Wilson used an ethnographic methodology to document how the departure of stabilizing, nuclear families from city life left a vacuum where low-income African American populations were quarantined from the rest of society. As Wilson’s studies indicate, the causes were structural, racial, and psychological (Wilson and Taub, 2006). Certainly the white evangelicals who left the city in a post-World War II era were religiously pious. They did not believe they were doing something wrong by moving away from urban life. They were protecting their families, ensuring that their children would attend the best schools, and relocating to “safe” and “stable” neighborhoods. Yet, they failed to recognize the cultural, economic, and racial ramifications of their collective migration, and the individualized theology of evangelical church leaders served only to exacerbate the problems. It is with these types of realities in mind that evangelical theologians today must analyze the new migration back to the city and the evangelical missiologies informing that migration. If the problems caused by white flight were social, racial, and systemic, then the theological solutions to these problems must likewise include social, racial, and systemic analyses. They must allow for a fully self-critical reflection on the behavioral patterns they inform and the cultural problems caused by that behavior. Does Keller’s theology allow for this?

Secondary concern with social issues and minimal attention to social analysis

Keller regularly expresses a sympathy for social analysis. In his consideration of various “church-culture models,” he mentions the problems observed by sociologists Robert Putnam and David Campbell, who argued that Christians have created an idol through their desire to secure political clout and re-establish a “Christian-dominated society” (Keller, 2012: 224). Keller likewise incorporates social analysis into his understanding of justice, observing, for example, that children may be born into poverty “through no fault of their own” and raised in an environment that is “extremely detrimental to learning” (Keller, 2012: 324). Further, Keller admits that Christians have historically supported certain aspects of culture, including slavery and segregation, that are informed by “flawed exegesis of the Bible.” The evangelical church is known, Keller says, for protecting its own, existing “as a subcultural cul-de-sac” and displaying an inability to offer any kind of cultural distinctiveness. “Isn’t the church’s real problem today not only the views we hold but also our failure to practice a distinctly different way of life?” (Keller, 2012: 224). These observations bespeak a sensitivity to social issues and to the complicity of the church in perpetuating them. ³ But is this sensitivity adequate? Does Keller’s theology have the theoretical infrastructure to allow room for social critique as a way of ensuring that what the church says adequately informs and corrects what the church does? In brief, does Keller’s urban emphasis sufficiently protect against new forms of social injustice? Let us consider three examples.

First, in continuity with the American Calvinist tradition which is his theological heritage, Keller insists on the priority of the preached word and the secondary status of social activism.

The ministry of the Word is the priority of the local church. The first thing people need to hear when they come to church is “believe in Jesus,” not “do justice.” Why? Because believing in Jesus meets a more radical human need, and because if they don’t believe in Jesus, they won’t have the gospel motivation to do justice in the world. So the first priority of the local church under its elders is to make disciples, not to do housing rehabilitation or feed the poor. (Keller, 2012: 324)

Of course, we should interpret this claim in light of the social sensitivity we just highlighted, but the claim remains: social issues and social analysis are given second place to the more pressing and important need to preach. Concern for the poor provides a “plausibility structure” to the preached word, while “loving deeds of service to someone” are “an attractive testimony to the truth and motivational power of the gospel” (Keller, 2012: 322). Attention to social justice and to the social implications of one’s theology are secondary. The gospel changes society but not because of its resistant or revolutionary form. It is an individualized message, moving to culture only secondarily through individual healing (Keller, 2012: 46–53). Issues of oppression tied up with history, race, culture, and tradition may be tangentially included but are not worked out in a manner mirroring their social nature.

Second, Keller insists that the church should remain apolitical. When reflecting on how to integrate church members with the community, Keller asserts that efforts in development and reform should remain secondary to efforts in relief, which he defines as “giving direct aid to meet physical, material, and social needs” (Keller, 2012: 325). Community development and reform “can require too much political activity and enmeshment,” Keller says, for a body of religious people whose primary concern is to bring individuals into a “right relationship with God.” Engaging directly in political issues will result eventually “in the congregation becoming too allied with particular civil magistrates and political parties in ways that can compromise the witness, independence, and authority of the church” (Keller, 2012: 326). The church should “be more careful than those who see social reform as the church’s job—a view that usually leads to the politicization of the church in which it becomes identified with particular political parties and causes” (Keller, 2012: 274). This insistence on an “apolitical” presence does not leave room for substantial correction of the 20th century’s mass exodus from the city or the 21st century’s return to it. Nor does it recognize the already-political nature of all theology.

In this regard, Keller would do well to facilitate more substantial interaction with theologians like Johann Baptist Metz or James Cone, who insist that all theological talk—of God, humanity, church, world, missiology, and so forth—is already political. Each Christian expression is located in a definite historical situation. No theological expression is without a culture, a cultural memory, and a history of narratives that populate that culture. Unnoticed by those who sit prominently in positions of power in those cultures—as do the white, middle-class evangelicals who are among Keller’s biggest fans—is the manner in which the dominant cultural narrative preserves a particular political and ideological framework. These frameworks disallow forms of flourishing dependent on other ideologies. The Christian’s response should be to speak against such combinations of ideology and cultural hegemony. For Metz, that prophetic comportment takes the form of critical theology, appropriating the prophetic tradition of Christianity’s Jewish roots by critiquing power structures in business, politics, and even the church (Metz, 1994). For Cone, that prophetic comportment takes the form of a condemnation of white hegemony in US theology (Cone, 1975). It is ultimately only those who have suffered systemic injustice whose voice can disrupt the easy perpetuation of dominance by the theological majority.

Third, we may consider the manner in which Keller negotiates the relationship between church and culture. In his impressively deliberate survey of church-culture models in chapters 15 through 17, Keller’s final evaluation betrays what we may call a pragmatic or even technocratic mode of analysis and minimizes the impact of the carefully argued pages preceding it. After laying out summaries of the four operative models, which Keller labels Transformationist, Relevance, Counterculturalist, and Two Kingdoms, he makes his final evaluation by following the lea of D. A. Carson. Up to this point in the chapter, Keller has presented a patient and deliberate synopsis of each model, highlighting both its values and shortcomings. His guiding principle is to pursue the “balanced” approach to each model, taking the good with the bad, on the way to a biblically defensible conclusion. However, as his argument comes to a close, Keller does not highlight theological balance but practicality:

I believe most of these concerns can be reduced to two fundamental questions. The first question deals with our attitude toward cultural change: Should we be pessimistic or optimistic about the possibility for cultural change? The second question exposes our understanding of the nature of culture itself and speaks to its potential for redemption: Is the current culture redeemable and good, or fundamentally fallen? (Keller, 2012: 225; italics his)

To put it bluntly, Keller and Carson ask, “Is the church wasting its time by worrying about culture in the first place?” The accuracy of the various culture-church models is determined by the possibility—or lack thereof—that culture will be changed. Not operative in this evaluative approach are questions stemming from, say, relationality, nurture, identity, injustice, or history. If the final evaluation had been offered by telling a story of suffering or highlighting solidarity with the poor or reflecting on the experiences of the marginalized, our critique of Keller would be different. As it is, we find Keller and Carson following a methodological formula that is essentially technocratic. They evaluate the most appropriate approach to culture by asking to what extent culture will mold to their own purposes, thus reducing culture to a means that allows them to accomplish their own ends. The preferred alternative would be to value culture as a living, irreducible human entity that, like the people who occupy it, is unpredictable, messy, and may in fact never change. Indeed, for the theologian motivated by love, culture’s intractability plays no role in the theological equation. Culture “is,” and the theologian loves it as it is.

Rethinking missiology of “the center”

If we are right in assuming that the best way to address both white flight and gentrification is to integrate social critique into evangelical theology, and if we have adequately demonstrated Keller’s insufficient adoption of social analysis, we must consider alternatives. Keller establishes his theological non-negotiables in the opening chapters of Center Church: the centrality of the gospel, the verbal content of the gospel, the priority of the biblical witness in understanding the gospel, and the insistence that the gospel changes culture by changing individuals. The following suggestions assist in cultivating a deeper sensitivity to the social problems that such non-negotiables can cause.

First, an adaptation, indeed encouragement, of technical, sociological analyses of the urban resurgence is of vital importance if the systemic ramifications of individualized approaches to the city are going to be adequately addressed. Mark Mulder and James K. A. Smith, professors at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan, have written on the need for scholars to engage in a critical, cultural, and sociological analysis of the complex relationship between evangelicals and the city (2009). Their call is for scholarly attention to the sociological patterns that indicate evangelicals’ complex relationship with urban communities. The theological upshot of Smith and Mulder’s observation is to insist that if evangelicals intend to correct the decades of systemic injustice perpetuated by cultural patterns and the theological reinforcement of those patterns, they cannot rely merely on the hope that changed individuals will change culture.

The young scholar James Bielo of Miami University offers an engaging response to Mulder and Smith’s call (2011a, 2011b). Bielo uses an ethnographic methodology to highlight the socially and culturally minded patterns of many evangelicals who have returned to the city in recent decades. Groups like the “new monastics” and “Acts 29 churches” incorporate social and political considerations in missional strategies, opposing items like non-residential development and supporting architectural preservation to preserve property value. These urban-oriented groups bring both theological and political freshness along with their urban return. They build community gardens, support locally grown produce, and engage openly in politics. Unlike Keller’s urge not to become political, these Christians are openly so. But Bielo’s summary of these refreshing attitudes is not in and of itself adequate. In order to protect against patterns of behavior that can result in deeper forms of injustice, theologians must be willing to adopt a more fundamentally critical approach to their own theological points of view.

Fundamentally, such changes must be methodological, willing to test the very foundation of evangelical approaches. The boldest of such approaches will adopt social, political, racial, gendered, and historical criticism into the very infrastructure of their projects. Too often, evangelical theologians offer a perfunctory wave to critical philosophers without actually adopting those philosophies into their respective systems. David Fitch’s (2011) use of the social-critical categories in Slavoj Žižek’s philosophy signifies a move in the right direction. Fitch addresses the negative political image associated with “George Bush evangelicals,” not by taking an apologetic stance or recycling old methodologies. Quite to the contrary, Fitch adopts a dangerously self-critical approach. Žižek’s (psycho)analytic categories provide the structure for critiquing some of evangelicalism’s most sacred tenants, including inerrancy, the decision for Christ, and the dream of a Christian nation. It is only after Fitch’s foray into self-critique—let’s call it “confession”—that he attempts a reconstruction of evangelical missiology, calling the church to an incarnational presence and participation in the work of the triune God.

Allow me to offer a second suggestion: evangelicals can adopt a more self-critical theology by demystifying the city itself. Not unlike the original impetuses for the YMCA and the Salvation Army in the 19th and 20th centuries, evangelicals’ recent attention to the city betrays an underlying obsession with and perhaps idolization of urban life. The city has become a destination for pilgrims. For Christians in the days of western, American expansion, cities were “in effect, the steepest hill to climb for Christ, redemptive for Christian believers as much as for their missionized targets.” (Bielo 2011a: 14). The city was “a place to reach spiritual heights not available elsewhere in an increasingly homogenous, middle-class society.” This uniqueness bred a kind of mystery and, ultimately, sanctity to urban living (Orsi, 1999: 9; see also Bielo, 2011a: 14; Winston, 2000). It is not difficult to make a similar observation in the renewed emphasis on the city today. The city is a place for penitence and redemption. Returning to it, suffering in it, serves as a means of atoning for the sins of past generations. Consider the following song excerpts by the popular Christian musician Derek Webb:

I repent, I repent of my pursuit of America’s dream

I repent, I repent of living like I deserve anything

Of my house, my fence, my kids, my wife

In our suburb where we’re safe and white

I am wrong and of these things I repent

I repent, I repent of parading my liberty

I repent, I repent of paying for what I get for free

For the way I believe that I am living right

By trading sins for others that are easier to hide

I am wrong and of these things I repent . . .

Of domesticating you until you look just like me. (Webb, 2004)

Though certainly a welcome alternative to the calloused neglect of social injustice, Webb’s words betray an angst that may be assuaged only by a return to the city. In this sense, the city becomes a kind of spiritual token. It is the mystical path to renewed spirituality—a hill to climb on the way to deeper piety.

Keller’s uptake of the evangelical focus on the city as a means to a missiological end discloses a similar objectification of urban life. The city in and of itself is secondary to the propagation of the verbal, gospel message. It is a step in a process of self-multiplication. The most obvious danger with this particular way of thinking is that the people who make up the city likewise become objects, thus merely continuing the patterns of a post-World War II era. Then, the city was a burden to remove on the path to suburban Eden. Now, the city is a strategic boon and further guarantee of successful mission. In both scenarios, the city’s identity as an autonomous, living entity made up of autonomous, living individuals is compromised. If recent evangelical missiologies intend to correct prior patterns, they must address this question directly: Is the city merely a secondary, less important means to a primary, more important end?

Third, Keller and others like him must cultivate a deeper sense of openness to theologies outside of their tradition for navigating how to respond collectively to a destructive past. Among the many examples of such theologies is a document that emerged out of the German Commission on Justice and Peace, or Deutsche Kommission Justitia et Pax, in response to the ongoing and collective guilt surrounding the Nazi domination of 20th-century Germany. Entitled “Memory, Truth, and Justice: Recommendations on Dealing with a Burdened Past,” the document offers suggestions for how religious communities can respond to their complicity in national sins. Among the ecclesial patterns suggested by the Deutsche Kommission are (1) an adoption of critical theologies of the past; (2) the creation of “more just laws”; (3) changing the elite; and (4) incorporating symbolic religious acts into communal practices that illustrate solidarity between victims and the victimizers.

Evangelicals can adopt such patterns of behavior by cultivating new disciplines to protect against new forms of disestablishment. Pastoral leadership can exhibit a more open willingness to participate in local, civic endeavors, and most importantly, evangelicals can allow for a critical theology of their own past and a confession of the connection between church teachings and the urban hardships those teachings create. Using a robust theology of sin as their point of departure, these theologies must confess evangelicals’ complicity in the creation of cultural patterns that have led to suffering, including thought patterns, culture-wide behavior, and political systems. Evangelical leaders can follow the lead of the Deutsche Kommission by initiating patterns of behavior that reinforce what is sung and said on Sunday mornings with communal patterns of renewal. These could include suggested prayers, discussions of political issues held at the church, and partnership in community efforts to end poverty. Evangelicals should likewise encourage church members to participate in school boards, civic endeavors, and local government. Far from an apolitical comportment, religious leaders should be among the most politically active in their communities.

Conclusion

The purpose of this article has been to analyze the adequacy of one leading evangelical theology of the city to the problems caused by white flight in the late 20th century and the ongoing ramifications of this exodus in the urban return of white evangelicals. Thankfully, many evangelicals have realized their complicity in the injustices caused by suburbanization and have worked to ameliorate such problems, yet until these same evangelicals can include various forms of social criticism and activism into their traditional, methodological non-negotiables, we must remain critical of their efforts. The theologian we analyzed, Tim Keller, takes up the evangelical emphases on the verbal content of the gospel message, the verbal content of the biblical witness to that message, and the prioritization of the individual’s response to both. Our thesis has been that these emphases do not provide adequate space for social criticism and must ultimately make us wary of endorsing the new wave of evangelical return. Even though Keller’s missiology is a welcome shift from the suburban megachurch models that flourished in the 1980s and 1990s, one hopes he will remain open to theologies formed in more substantial dialogue with those underneath evangelicalism’s ongoing cultural impact.